


Blue

by ravenousgrue



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, death mention, rape mention, slur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-06-26
Packaged: 2018-04-06 06:31:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4211664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenousgrue/pseuds/ravenousgrue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>just some thoughts about the world's worst dad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue

When he's a young man he wants to serve his country and he flourishes in the service. He's tall and handsome and never alone if he doesn't want to be. He never does.

His firstborn son breaks what's left of his heart. His mother died delivering him and he sits with the child in his arms, rocking, humming, feeling useless. The boy isn't what he wanted but he doesn't love him any less and he wonders what it will be like to feel his own child slip away in his arms. His son lives but his heart never recovers. It scars over, hardens, and the boy isn't named until he's two years old.

He's fourteen when he has his first kiss and its with another boy, behind the school. After the kiss he bloodies the other boys nose and drags him out onto the playground, calling him a faggot, telling his friends how he came on to him. He is a bully and nobody challenges him.

He sends his closest friend to oversee the mine and that's when things start to slip. When there's no one to tell you NO, when there's no one to question your decisions, it's easy to accidentally ingest your own poison.

Kalashnikov is so young when they first meet, both of them are so young. Right away he can tell he's a better strategist but he isn't a decorated War Hero, so even when Kalashnikov has a brilliant idea, Joe gets the credit. Kalashnikov never complains and it takes him years to understand why.

His second son is the worst of him and it makes him superstitious in spite of himself. The older he gets, the bigger he gets, the more concerned Joe is that people will find his violent behavior in conflict with the narrative their Savoir is giving them. When he is old enough he is sent away, and there is a sinister intelligence in his eyes. He knows why he is being made to leave but he doesn't say and Joe knows that if he lets him stay his son will kill him.

His first serious relationship is with a woman named Payton. She is petite and pretty and she loves how easily he can pick her up. They are young and in love and she tells him he would be handsome with long hair. Once the summer is over they drift apart. Sometimes he thinks he imagined her. He can't remember what she smelled like.

He has his newest wife tend his tortured skin. He's had no luck finding any others and all he can think about is how all he'll amount to is a last, struggling remnant of an extinction event. His legacy is pointless if all of humanity withers and dies. She starts to brush his hair and he chokes, he sobs, and she comforts him and sings to him without being prompted. Because she wants to. He thinks he loves her. She is dead two months later. Complications with a miscarriage.

There's a crackle in the air as everyone waits to see what he's going to do with the group of women they've found. The gathered men want pussy more than they want blood, but there was still enough humanity left in them to hesitate. Was this the sort of men they were? Joe takes them all, and the two he likes the most he keeps. The others, he lets the men do with as they please. Some mutter, but most think it's fair.

His third son is beautiful and healthy and strong and he carries him on his shoulders, plays with him even though it makes his knees and back twinge. Kalashnikov visits and calls himself Uncle and Joe feels like they're friends again. Teaching Rictus is difficult and the older he gets, the less he progresses. In a flare of spite he gives Rictus's mother to some War Boys and then executes everyone involved. Rictus never asks about her.

He thinks of it late one night, his latest conquests curled up on either side of him, how none of the girls ever ask for tampons, ever complain about cramps, how none of them havegotten pregnant. It settles into his bones, that the world is gone. He will have no wife, no family, no first house, just an increasingly large gang scratching in the dirt, trying to live just one more day. It might be all swallowed up by desert in a few years, he thinks, the Earth a dry, barren tomb for everything he'd ever known. That can't happen. He won't let it.

Splendid falls from the truck in slow motion and it doesn't matter which way he turns the wheel, because there is no way he'll miss her. He crawls from the wreckage and staggers to her prone body, crumples in a heap a ways behind the wreck. He is on his knees beside her too-still body, screaming. His last hope, limp and lifeless, and he picks her up, still screaming. He is not a god. He is a dying old man and she hated him so much it had killed her.

His first childhood memory is of ocean. The sound of the waves, the humid heat of a Nothern Territory summer, the smell of sea air and the grit of sand on his skin. Most of all, he remembers the color of the ocean, how blue it was, as blue as his own eyes. He clings to the memory too hard and warps it, and for a time he discards healthy breeders who don't have blue eyes, the choice based on some half-skimmed, half remembered Wikipedia article about eye genetics. He is Posiedon stranded in a desert and if his children don't have the last remnants of the sea in their gaze how will they rule?

He feels hollow when the Organic slits her open like an animal, yanking the child out, manhandling it when he sees it's dead. Not long after, he hears distant gunfire and then an explosion and he knows Kalashnikov is dead, too. He sends a vehicle out to retrieve the body but there isn't enough of anyone left to constitute a limb, nevermind a corpse. Even his wheel is gone. Joe turns the War Party around, his tail between his legs. He can't go back empty handed, but he can't go forward, either, and he's so, so tired.

There is a brief moment, when she hooks the harpoon into his rebreather and his mouth, that he thinks opening the bulletproof glass window had been a bad idea.

He has two more children after he dies, two girls with eyes that sometimes make their mother turn away, make her remember things she doesn't want to remember. Their eyes are just like his but it's the only thing he's given them. They hear stories about him when they're growing up, but none of the stories he'd tell. He's reduced to a boogeyman by the time his daughters are old enough to fully understand what he was, and by the time they have children of their own, he's nothing more than a ghost. His only legacy is that Warlord is a popular girls name by the time his great-grandchildren are grown.

 


End file.
